Robust Constitutivism: What Normativity Will Emerge from Facts about Agency?

Abstract The central claim of constitutivism is that there is an inescapable, constitutive aim (or feature) of action that generates and grounds normativity in general, and moral normativity in particular. However, constitutivist accounts often face two significant challenges: the specificity challenge, which argues that any norm-generating aim is too specific to be genuinely inescapable (giving rise to so-called ‘shmagency’ objections), and the vagueness challenge, which contends that any sufficiently general aim fails to generate specific norms. This paper argues that a version of constitutivism that draws on a Hegelian account of willing can overcome both challenges, thereby enabling constitutivism to maintain its viability as a metaethical theory.